Friday Mindset #188

Happy Friday!

Right you beautiful people, just a couple of notices before we jump in:

We’ve got a busy six weeks of staff CPD ahead of us, but there are a couple of July dates still free. If you’d like a staff CPD session on any aspect of VESPA, or on (i) building independent learning (ii) aspiration and motivation, or (iii) effective, evidence-based revision or (iv) coaching students or anything else you think we might be able to help with, let us know at [email protected], and we’ll be in touch!

Martin’s running a session for Bath Spa University’s Network for Learning on June 24th. This isn’t a freebie, sadly - it’s a paid session, but it’s a cracker. Click the image to find out more…

Alright, done. What have we got for you this week? Let’s dive in…

Something we're reading...

This contribution to the handwriting-versus-typing debate is thorough and well-referenced. The writing-as-thinking element of the debate is important; we don’t write to record what we know, the argument goes, we write to discover what we know.

The activity of writing builds durable networks of learning, the article points out, as well as improving spelling. But the crucial ones for us are charts 3 and 4: writing down, rather than typing information makes us more likely to retain it, and gives us a stronger conceptual understanding of the material.

This isn’t an anti-tech piece; there’s balance there too. Well worth a read, and easy enough to go through with a tutor group as well. Click the image below to access the article:

Portal Talk

Introducing the ‘wobble’

A low score tells you something. A score that's dropped might be telling you a story. That's the idea behind one of my favourite bits of the new VESPA Academy 2.0 - tracking how students' questionnaire answers change between cycles. Not just where they are, but where they're heading.

Because averages, useful as they are, can be brilliant at hiding problems. A VESPA score is made up of lots of individual answers, and a "fine-looking" 5 or 6 can quietly contain a 1/5 on "I have a positive view of myself." That's why the portal now drills into individual question responses, not just the headline numbers. A student can look perfectly steady on the surface while sliding from "I don't let a poor test result get me down" (5/5) to... letting it get them down quite a lot (3/5). That's the wobble. And it's exactly the kind of thing that's almost impossible to spot manually across a cohort of 300.

So the portal now does the spotting for you. The AI scans thousands of responses, flags the drops, and pulls together a coaching summary so staff know where to look first -which student, which questions, which patterns. But the AI isn't the intervention.

The teacher is; the relationship is, the conversation is. All the portal does is catch the wobble earlier, so the right adult can have the right conversation at the right time. Ideally before the wobble becomes a fall!

Want to see it in action with your own cohort in mind? Just a short, no-pressure demo 20 minutes, no slide deck, just the portal and your questions.

...or skip the chat and go straight to a free 14-day trial. It comes pre-loaded with dummy student and staff data, so you can poke around the full portal, wobbles and all, before committing to anything.

Something to try...

A quick one for everyone first - have you had a look at Drive and Listen? It’s very simple - super-clear dashcam footage from taxis driving through various locations. It’s been good fun to choose a city and have it on the screen for a few minutes in a tutorial. Even virtual travel broadens the mind. (A student recently commented, as we drove through Rio De Janeiro, “Everywhere’s nicer than here, isn’t it Sir?”) 😢

Now, subscribers, we’ve got something interesting for you this week. Recently we shared a new, unpublished VESPA activity called Behaviour, Benefit, Belief, inspired by Nir Eyal’s new book.

And here, you’ve got a ten-minute clip of Martin taking you through the thinking behind the activity in more detail…

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